The Creative Cycle

There is a part of the creative cycle that feels like utter destruction. Maybe you’ve felt it before.

That crushing weight on your body and mind, the whispering inner voice that pleads with you, “Not now. I just can’t.” That feeling like you’re pushing against a wall and nothing will budge.

It’s the chaotic nothingness that blows through your life, demanding that all productive activity comes to a screaming halt.

I’m not talking about depression. Not talking about any kind of emotional crisis. (Although we can turn this into one pretty easily.)

I’m talking about a much more common occurrence. In my house we call it, Shiva.

Shiva is the part of the creative cycle (an unavoidable and necessary part) when we mentally and emotionally reset.

The problem is that our fast-paced lives don’t leave room for Shiva. We are trained to go, go, GO! And rarely reset. However, if we were to begin recognizing these three stages more readily and welcoming them, yes, Shiva too, we would be able to create and produce more powerfully than ever before.

This is my synopsis of the three stages of the creative cycle:

▪ The first stage is Brahma. The lightning strike of creativity. This is a stage of inspiration and excitement. Where you are totally high on some great new idea/concept/vision. The crazy fun stage.

▪ The second is Vishnu: The actual work; the nose to the grindstone. No longer lit up but plodding along toward that vision. Continuing to do the work that you were inspired about before.

▪ Last is Shiva: Shiva is the destroyer. It means to stop. It’s a dissolve into chaos and nothingness. This is the part of the cycle that our culture does not honor. Which is why we feel it’s wrong to do nothing all day, or why we get yelled at in school for daydreaming. BUT Shiva is an integral and mandatory part of the cycle of creativity. It’s the reset button between things “happening”.

We expect people to work 50 weeks a year with two weeks off, but to live a creative life we have to honor the natural cycle.

Some people go through the whole cycle in a month. Some take a year or more. While some people go through all three stages in a single day, but that’s rare.

What many of us don’t realize is that Brahma ONLY comes out of Shiva.

We work and work, waiting for the next bout of inspiration to come, not realizing that it is only out of the destruction, chaos and nearly vegetative nothingness of Shiva that we can once again reach Brahma.

It’s easy to wallow in Shiva, fearing that we will never again do anything of worth. That we are tapped out, void of inspiration and a virtual waste of space on the planet.

But, no matter how dark things might seem in life, the light will follow. When things seem terrible and meaningless sometimes the only thing to do is hold fast and wait for the light.

It is pretty interesting, once you are aware of this cycle you can almost feel the shift back into Brahma. A whirlwind of projects and activities fall into your lap and you find yourself trying to do five things at once when just yesterday you could barely be bothered to get out of bed.

I encourage you to begin noticing where you are in the creative cycle and allow yourself the opportunity to reset from time to time.